[David adding his nickels worth]
I was going to start this with “here’s the poop”, but then I got derailed about what a crappy situation this was and I it just went down hill from there. So then, I restarted with “ok, here’s the scoop…”, but then I got sidetracked because guess what I am always using a scoop to pick up (think Theo here) and I ended up going down the same stinky path. So I’m trying to restart it again….
Laurie and I saw the oncologist this morning and got the scoop on what we can expect moving forward. We don’t have the pathology on the tumors, but that will probably come when we see the surgeon next week. The oncologist wants to have the tumors tested for a specific strain. It may make it possible to do a more targeted chemotherapy regimen. The current plan though is to use the following triad of drugs:
- CPT11 – side effect is about 50% risk of hair loss
- Avastin – due to the metastisis; can effect healing, so won’t start for 2 months
- Xeloda/5FU – similar to before so we can expect the tiredness, like we had before; the two treatments are pill vs intravenous and we have to figure which we want to deal with.
The oncologist is looking at 3-4 months of treatment. We’ll assess as we go along, but apparently research shows that the extra 3 months doesn’t really help that much and the key thing is monitoring. Laurie will get scans every 3 months for the next year or two, then go to 6 months and eventually yearly. They may also begin doing MRIs in addition to the other scans to ensure that we see any undesirable developments. For some reason one of the excised tumors didn’t show on CT or PET scans, so MRIs are going to be needed.
The other thing to decide on is if we want to go with a “pick line” or mediport. The mediport means doing the surgery for that again and we’re not a big fan of the bumpy chest syndrome. The pick line means having a line in Laurie’s arm and some form of bandage around it.
We asked if our
So, that’s about it for now….
